Develop your investing knowledge through programs that explore data-driven decision-making and diversification. You’ll understand how to navigate markets with strategy and confidence.
Gain a comprehensive understanding of stock investing, valuation, and stock movements in this course. Learn about essential valuation techniques, financial statements, and the fundamentals of stock investing, as well as the factors that influence stock prices and how to analyze them.
Master Excel, review corporate finance, and build a valuation model on a public company. Gain basic and intermediate Excel skills and learn how to read financial statements, build valuations, and predict market trends.
Join our financial modeling class to learn essential finance and accounting concepts, build a discounted cash flow (DCF) model in Excel, acquire advanced Excel skills, explore corporate finance and valuation, and create a financial model on a real company. This hands-on course will teach you practical financial skills.
Done for all sorts of reasons, investing is all about turning your money, time, and energy into more valuable income. Often, this is done by purchasing assets that later grow in value such as stocks, bonds, trusts, private equity, or real estate, but it can also mean putting money into a growing IRA fund for retirement, collecting antiques, or turning your vacation home into an Airbnb. However, investing is different from simply saving money in that your savings account only collects a small return over time, while investing has the potential to grow your financial capacity significantly.
It became significantly easier for the average person to invest in 1792 when the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opened to the public. However, successfully turning a profit often takes a bit of savvy. Depending on risk tolerance, some investors choose to actively manage their financial portfolios, while others take a passive approach to investing. Additionally, all investors can choose to invest in fast-growing companies that offer high price-earnings (P/E) and lower P/E companies that produce greater dividends.
While money kept in a savings account can diminish in value due to inflation, placing your money in an IRA, the stock market, or real estate enables each dollar to increase in value. In this way, investing can help you get ahead of inflation. When you know what you’re doing, your investments can also yield enough money to save for retirement and afford the luxuries you want.
Investing isn’t just great for padding your wallet, though. Because investing is a high-demand skill, you can build a fulfilling career by helping others make smarter money decisions. In fact, investing skills are relevant to a wide range of professions and industries. Regardless of whether you decide to become an investor long-term, learning these skills will help you develop skills that benefit your finances in the long run.
Depending on the focus of your investing class, the skills you learn can vary. For instance, a stock market investing class may not cover alternative investment methods such as purchasing real estate or antiques. Meanwhile, a FinTech class may cover investing as a small part of a broader curriculum. With this in mind, there are a few overarching themes common among investing classes. These include financial literacy, accounting, financial analysis and modeling, FinTech, and soft skills such as financial discipline.
The Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, argued that “only the educated are free, ” and just as his philosophy applies to reading and writing, it also holds for finances. When you understand the concepts and skills needed to earn, borrow, save, and invest money, you gain greater power over otherwise-limiting barriers such as debt, medical costs, and work burnout. While learning investing, you’ll become more attuned to the connection between assets, liabilities, income, and expenses. With greater literacy also comes a greater capacity to judge when a financial risk is worth it, leading to more informed decisions.
By evaluating financial data and assets, financial analysis helps people make more informed financial decisions. Visual charts called financial models make it easier to understand market trends and predict changes that may impact investments. While most investment classes don’t teach every financial analysis skill in the book, it’s not uncommon for investing classes to include software skills like SAP, Excel, Tableau, QuickBooks, FreshBooks, or Hyperion. Similarly, some classes also explore how to interface with databases using the programming language, SQL.
Among finance’s most forward-thinking branches, FinTech aims to create tech solutions for finance, including software, apps, cryptocurrency, and cybersecurity. Popular examples include secure online banking apps, blockchain technology, and credit reporting services like Credit Karma. In addition to understanding software like Excel and Tableau, FinTech professionals utilize coding languages such as Python, JavaScript, and SQL. Additional skills needed to create these solutions include data analytics and visualization, machine learning, and Artificial intelligence (AI). While some of these skills are included in standard investing classes, participating in a FinTech-focused class is the best way to learn them.
Financial accounting involves tracking, organizing, and summarizing financial transactions such as business expenses and income. Investing classes that include accounting may cover skills like financial modeling, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), numeracy, financial reporting, and regulatory standards. You may also explore accounting software like QuickBooks, Excel, and Tableau, as well as communication skills.
Many novice investors learn the hard way that leading with emotion in the world of investments can lead to financial trouble. It can be easy to impulse-sell when the market drops only to lose a great opportunity when it climbs again later. Learning investing can help improve self-discipline, and many classes offer advice on how to stay level-headed and set boundaries around investments. By providing tips on how to manage and diversify a financial portfolio, investing classes also help students become more detail-oriented.
Like any other skill, investing may be harder or easier for different people depending on their preexisting abilities and limitations. For instance, those with a background in finance won’t need to learn everything from scratch and those with more free time will automatically have more exposure to market patterns, making the ups and downs easier to understand. Similarly, learners who have the support of an expert will find their learning path much easier. In general, however, learning to invest is more a matter of time and practice than anything else.
Depending on your unique strengths and weaknesses, you may find certain aspects of investing more challenging than others. However, most new learners tend to agree that the most difficult aspects of investing are:
You can learn the basics well enough to begin exploring the low-risk side of the stock market in as little as six to twelve months, but it typically takes one to five years to understand the stock market well enough to make a profit. Other forms of investing follow a similar timeline. While this may seem like a long time, there’s a vast amount of information there to uncover before you can make informed decisions at the pace of today’s market. Without taking the time to digest this necessary information, it’s incredibly easy to be driven by your emotions or poorly conceived online advice. Investment soft skills are best acquired through practice, which takes sustained effort over time.
There’s no single best class format for all students, meaning you should weigh your unique learning needs in your choice of class. In-person classes offer the greatest dose of social energy, allowing for class discussion and face-to-face feedback. These courses are hosted from a physical location, requiring additional time for commuting.
Online training comes in two formats, with live online training aligning most closely with in-person training. These courses are highly interactive, including real-time activities and reciprocity. You’ll need to attend scheduled classes via the internet but have the flexibility to skip commutes. In contrast, on-demand (asynchronous) classes have few time commitments and operate by providing self-study materials for you to explore without the aid of an instructor.
With free resources like Noble Desktop's investing seminars, you can learn investing without investing a penny. However, the danger in this strategy is that free resources don’t offer comprehensive training, leaving you to scavenge from thousands of sources (of varying quality) before you can piece together the full picture. Taking a paid class will get you there sooner and help you develop soft skills that you can’t get from reading. With feedback from an instructor, you’ll also have a leg up on reversing any shortcomings you may have as an investor.
Learning complementary skills can make you a savvy, efficient investor, and can even make investing easier to learn. When deciding what to learn, consider your goals and choose skills that align best. Some skills that harmonize well with investing include the following:
Since the 19th century, Boston has been an important center of research and business and is an ideal location to invest in unique healthcare and business assets. In addition, backbone industries like finance and big data offer further opportunities for investors looking to diversify their portfolios.
Investing is a subcategory of finance, making finance more closely connected to investing than any other industry. 183,000 people, or 11.9% of the Boston workforce, are currently employed in finance, and the industry is seeing rapid growth in FinTech-related projects.
Big data is a high-demand industry in Boston and is anticipated to grow by 35% in the 2022 to 2032 decade. Local businesses of all sizes are looking for professionals who can help draw insights from data, including trend predictions and risk evaluations. Top data employers in Boston include household names like Google, Amazon, and IBM.
Boston’s prodigious healthcare industry is supported by 147,000+ workers and accounts for 18.6% of the city’s jobs. The Longwood Medical Area includes 45 hospitals and 120+ healthTech businesses. Owing to 46,000 scientists, the city is also known for its contributions to medical research and has remained the number one recipient of NIH research funding in America for over twenty years. Renowned universities such as Harvard Medical School depend on investments to fund clinical research and pharmaceuticals.
While nearly 50% of the local business economy is made up of small businesses, many local companies provide opportunities for investors to collect on high-value products and services. Business is one of Boston’s biggest employment industries and supports more than 523,900 workers.
Today, roughly 17% of Boston residents struggle with poverty, but learning to invest can help you avoid becoming part of this statistic by providing wealth-building marketable skills. With investing tools in your arsenal, you can choose from a variety of finance careers that offer salaries that rival or surpass the local median income.
For taking care of bookkeeping and financial reporting, Accountants earn good money in Boston, averaging around $60,000 to $73,000 per year. Bookkeepers with fewer qualifications typically earn between $47,000 and $67,000, while Certified Public Accountants collect an average of $119,000 to $165,000 per year.
In financial analysis, there are a variety of different paths to choose from, including investment analysis and research analysis. On average, Financial Analysts in Boston earn between $67,000 and $90,000.
As financial advisors, Investment Bankers help companies make smart investments. Boston-based Investment Bankers typically earn $73,000 to $128,000 annually.
Acting as a middleman, Private Equity Associates help individuals and businesses make deals, including investments. In the Boston area, these professionals net around $84,000 and $143,000 per year.
Boston has several investing classes to choose from, including courses on a variety of topics, from angel investing to FinTech. Thanks to this variety, you can also choose between short introductory classes and more comprehensive bootcamps aimed at career preparation. Though Boston is limited in terms of in-person investing classes, there are a few classes to choose from. In contrast, online options are plentiful, meaning more flexibility as well as time to apply your newfound skills outside of class.
Noble Desktop offers professional-grade finance classes that are delivered in a live online format and led by industry experts. Their Financial Analyst Training Program offers comprehensive career training that includes financial modeling, accounting, financial reporting, and automation. Even if you start the course with no prior knowledge, hands-on projects will get you up and running with advanced Excel skills as well as soft skills like teamwork and communication. Noble’s time-tested curriculum works well for a variety of learning styles and allows you to retake the course for free if you decide you want a review.
If you already know a bit about finance and want to level up in data analytics, Noble’s Python for Data Science Bootcamp is the perfect place to learn coding skills that can enhance your existing skill set. With beginner-friendly training that includes skills-based projects, you don’t need any knowledge of coding to master skills like analytics and visualization. In addition to giving real-world experience, these projects will also help you develop compelling material for inclusion in your professional portfolio. Whenever you get stumped, you can fall back on your mentor, an expert who meets with you one-on-one throughout the course to offer support and career guidance. After completing this program, you can level up even further by participating in the Python for Finance Bootcamp.
Does stock market or real estate investing feel like your ideal way to invest? Check out the live online Stock Market Investing Fundamentals class at NYIM Training for a comprehensive overview of how financial markets function. Through case studies, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of the catalysts behind the Dot-com Bubble and Financial Crisis before learning how you can apply this knowledge to current markets. In addition to learning how prices are influenced, you’ll learn sound strategies for how to gain investment profit sustainably. You’ll also receive tips on how to research accurate information and predict outcomes.
Catered toward future Investment Bankers, iXperience has an in-person Investment Finance class designed for career preparation. The class’s hands-on assignments are structured to help participants learn how to use Excel to evaluate financial data, write reports, identify reliable research sources, manage a diverse portfolio, and trade assets strategically. While developing financial reporting skills, students build financial literacy, learning concepts like inflation, interest rates, financial regulation, AFS notes, the accounting equation, credit ratings, and TVM. For those who are interested in taking their investment skills into a career, iXperience also offers a version of this class with a built-in internship and assistance with job placement.
Those who want to invest in start-up businesses or secure an investment for their own business can get beginner-friendly training through Class Rebel. Students in their online Angel Investing 101 course get a thorough overview of essential lingo including concepts like private versus public companies, legal terms, and SAFEs. From there, learners explore strategies for pitching investments, negotiating deals, and crowdfunding. To help students make smart deals, the class also includes plenty of tips for identifying risks and predicting outcomes.
Want to get involved in the fast-growing FinTech industry? At Practical Programming, you can participate in a live online FinTech Bootcamp that covers SQL along with Python for data science, machine learning, and automation. Get comfortable pulling insights from financial data as you build financial models and use algorithms to calculate trends. With object-oriented coding skills, you’ll be able to combine data from multiple sources for more accurate predictions.
For a basic introduction to investing, beginners can enjoy an online class at Bunker Hill Community College. In Stocks, Bonds, and Investing: Oh, My!, students learn about a variety of investment types, including stocks, IRA accounts, 401,000 plans, ADRs, REITs, and mutual funds. This course starts with the absolute basics, explaining where to buy and sell assets and how to research. With a curriculum designed by a business professional, students in this on-demand course have the freedom to explore investment resources at their preferred pace.
Students who want a fast turnaround on their investments may benefit from joining The Knowledge Academy’s Day Trading Masterclass. Rather than expounding long-term investments, this course navigates how to buy and sell assets within the same business day. Included in this short class are tips on analyzing markets, managing risks, and trading strategically. Students will also explore the psychology of trading, with an insider look into mass market reactions along with tips on how to manage emotions while trading. To ensure their class is accessible to a wide variety of learners, it’s available in multiple formats, from fully in-person to live online and on-demand.
Want to give your company a boost by offering investment training to employees? Noble Desktop provides corporate investment training both online and onsite in Boston. Instructors can come to your workspace to deliver in-person training or even provide live online sessions. As an alternative to private training, employers can also purchase group vouchers at a discounted price, enabling employees to pick the time and place of their training. To learn more, simply write a short email to Noble Desktop.